Tag Archives: sustainability

An article in IEEE Spectrum discusses the case for “replacing” power plants with “battery farms.” Besides the obvious problems that batteries don’t generate energy but only store them, there is some merit in implementing battery farms. Most importantly, they serve as a stock that can help balance the differences between rates of power generation and consumption. That systems aspect is particularly interesting to me.

What I see here is a series of problems, caused by business and political concerns, that that created the problems both that led to SunTech’s bankruptcy and that will impact the employees and investors, and indeed, the entire global economy.

I wrote a mini-review of The Conundrum, by David Owen, and posted it on Google+. It’s a book about climate change, resource depletion, and that science and technology will only make matters worse.

I didn’t like it, not just because I’m a science geek, but because Owen makes poor arguments in it. Unfortunately, I agree with him on his major premise – that only massively lowering consumption will work to save humanity in the long run – but his book offers nothing useful to advance or even defend this position. Read my Google+ post for more.

I came across a post at Core77 about a concept design for a device to clean up the Pacific Trash Vortex, a region of the north Pacific Ocean that seems to be gathering garbage, particularly plastic, where global ocean currents converge. Unfortunately, it’s a really bad design. I will sketch a solution that I think is much better.

The Pacific Trash Vortex is an interesting phenomenon that no one really saw coming till the 1980s, but, in hindsight, seemed rather obvious. Floating garbage will be carried by currents. Any gyre where several such currents meet will result in collections of garbage. This garbage eventually starts to poison the water and the wildlife that lives in it.

The idea behind the design in the Core77 post is that a device slowly wanders through the Vortex, collecting garbage in its net. When it’s full, it gets pulled up to a “mothership,” emptied, and then sent back for more.

19 May 2011: The Toronto District School Boardannounced a plan to put solar panels on 450 of its 558 schools – over 1 million square metres of roof space – and use the panels to generate the revenue needed to fund the $3 billion needed to repair those same roofs. Regardless of the narrow-minded nay-sayers, this is a great idea.

Amy Smith of the MIT D-lab has come up with a concept for a corn-shelling device for certain communities in developing countries. You can read all about it, including how to make it, here. I think this work is brilliant, and that the characteristics that make this design so good are key characteristics that should exist in every design, regardless of context.